Plane crash survivor tells of terror as flames took hold

An Australian woman who survived a Christmas Day plane crash in Burma says there was no warning and she feared she wouldn't make it out of the burning aircraft.

Public relations executive Anna Bartsch and partner Stuart Benson were among five Australians who made it off the Air Bagan Fokker 100 jet, after it crash landed near Heho airport in eastern Shan state.

Seventy of the 71 people on board survived, while a local tour guide was killed with a motorcyclist on the ground.

Bartsch, 31, from Adelaide, told Macquarie Radio yesterday she and Benson, 32, felt "lucky beyond belief" that they survived.

"It's quite surreal. It's hard to really register that the whole series of events were anything other than a crazy movie that we watched," she said from Burma.

Bartsch said there was no indication anything was wrong until the first impact.

"The fear really only came ... when we looked out the window as soon as we'd come to a halt and saw the flames through our window and realised how urgently we needed to get out. There were moments there ... where I thought I can't see us getting out, certainly not all of us, in time."

Bartsch said they were seated well down the aisle and feared the flames would ignite the fuel in the wing tanks. "Little did I know that the wings weren't there anymore. We only realised that when we got outside."